Memoirs

Providential Times

This is a journal of providential times: I call them providential because my birth coincided with the advent of world peace and the welfare state. Like so many of my generation born after that war, I have benefitted from the peace and stability that emerged reluctantly from the destruction of Europe. We have been the fortunate ones. My memories are faint and often second hand from the hours of listening to my parents reminiscing about their lives.

My story has been played out against the bigger landscape of those times across the 20th and 21st centuries. My direct lineage spans the 1918 flu pandemic to the Covid-19 equivalent of 2020. Before that my ancestors were agricultural workers in Somerset and Norfolk and miners who sought work wherever the seams of coal were discovered. I am descended from a line of restless shore seekers who roamed across Britain and Australia looking for new horizons.

Now in 2023, everything feels more fragile than I have ever experienced before, as if we have had it too good for too long. And yet, we lived through the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation, the decline of traditional industries and the transformation of the work environment, economic failures and now pestilence in the form of the Covid-19 pandemic. Sometimes the phrase ‘perfect storm’ seems the only way to capture a sense of multiple threats coming together, emerging from under the settled surface like a long dormant volcano. The giant elephant called climate catastrophe that is battering at the doors of our fortress is accompanied by big bear economic menaces trampling through the garbage waste of our conspicuous consumption while we play party games inside. Our digital diversions drown out the sound of impending peril.